Labor Department to Cut Export-Price Data Due to Budget Constraints

The Labor Department said Tuesday it will stop collecting data on export prices used to calculate economic output and measure trade flows due to funding constraints.

Bloomberg News

The department said in a statement it also will scale back data it collects in a quarterly program on employment and wages in order to achieve “necessary savings” and to “protect core programs.”

The nation’s primary statistics-gathering agencies are preparing new spending plans after lawmakers last month reached a broad deal to fund the federal government for the next two years. Funding for statistics gathering has been trending lower in recent years amid battles over government spending.

In the latest budget agreement, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics received a small funding increase this year. Still, the $592 million provided for the statistics agency in 2014 remains below 2011 and 2012 funding levels and $21.6 million below what President Barack Obama sought in his 2014 budget.

“With that comes a lot of choices we’d rather not be making,” Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said at a conference Tuesday. “This is one of the difficult choices when it comes to statistics and there will be difficult choices in just about every area of the budget.”

The export price data is part of a program that also collects data on import prices. The department compiles a monthly report on import and export prices using data collected from U.S. companies.

Economists and policy makers use the data to measure import inflation, trade flows and overall economic activity. Companies use the information to adjust prices for products they buy and sell abroad.

Some users of the data had been bracing for an even larger pullback as the Labor Department weighed how to cut the program.

For the quarterly employment and wage data, the Labor Department said it will reduce the “scope and frequency” of some of the information collected. The quarterly program, which started in the 1930s, measures national, state and city data.

The Labor Department produces some of the nation’s most closely watched economic data, including the monthly employment report that measures job creation and unemployment and the monthly consumer price index report.

To preserve its most closely watched indicators from budget cuts, the Labor Department last year eliminated reports tracking mass layoffs, environmentally friendly jobs and international labor markets. The international labor-markets report was important enough that the Conference Board, a private research organization, struck an agreement to take over the data tracking.

The nation’s other key provider of economic statistics, the Commerce Department, also is hammering out new spending plans for this year.

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